How to Gain Trust When You Present

It’s a plain and simple fact that if you don’t gain the trust of your audience, no matter how good a presenter you might be, no matter how many qualifications you have, no matter what your job title is, you will not succeed in achieving your goals and objectives.

By opening up and fully connecting with your audience you hugely increase the likelihood that people will open up to you and really listen to you. Building trust will maximise your impact and consequently your chances of success.

This article is co-written with Louise Ellinor Ronnerdahl

In this post, we explore the API Trust model (Authority, Presence, Impact), developed by Professor Peter Hawkins, and shine the spotlight on its three elements from a communication perspective. We will give you some tips and advice on how you can build trust in your communication as a leader, presenter, speaker or trainer.

Peter Hawkins’ model consists of three elements, which are at constant interplay. To be seen as trustworthy, we need to encompass all three dimensions. Typically, we tend to gravitate towards one or two of those dimensions, leaving the other/s underutilised.

When you present or lead and contribute to meetings and projects, how do you currently use authority, presence and impact to achieve trust?

‘Authority’ means demonstrating legitimacy, and it derives from what you know and what you have done in the past. It has to do with your achievements and experience and it is about finding a way of communicating these to your audience in a skilful way. Only if you demonstrate this legitimacy will people perceive it as worthwhile giving you their attention.

When demonstrating authority, you signal two things to your audience:

• You have experience and knowledge on the topic
• Therefore you have something to tell them that they don’t already know and is meaningful to them

Of course if someone is publicly famous for what they do their authority is already known, so it would be fair to say that they have an advantage (provided they are also respected for what they do). For those who are not so famous, it is vital that your audience receives good information about you before they see you speak. This is also one of the best reasons to make sure that your Linkedin Profile is up to date and impactful. This also applies to other forms of social media that you choose to embrace.

Once you are in the room, your role is to gain trust by embodying your authority through your Presence and Impact.

Presence means to be fully in the here and now. It is about building a strong connection with the audience and demonstrating engagement. People who have a lot of presence quickly build rapport with a wide range of people and are seen as empathetic and easy to relate to.

The effect that you have on your audience is that they truly feel that you are there for them and you are giving them your full attention and respect. This benefits you too of course because what you give out to others, in terms of connection, you also get in return.

By focusing out to your audience and being present for your audience releases you from becoming entangled in your ‘inner interference’, i.e. the thoughts and emotions that you might experience when in front of an audience. When we stand up in front of people, it is easy to feel nervous and those increased cortisol levels in your brain can have a negative impact on your ability to focus.

The golden rule here is… Don’t Present but be Consciously Aware of Your Presence.

The most vital component of being fully present is diaphragmatic breathing. Refer to previous article How to Present with the Voice of a Superwoman and How to Present with the Body Language of a Superwoman for practical guidance on how to do this. It is the diaphragmatic breathing that keeps you grounded, helps you relax, keep calm, increases the flow of oxygen through your body and reduces your level of cortisol. It also has a major role to play in the quality of your voice. Again refer to last article.

Being fully present for your audience also relies on good eye contact. Five to eight words per person is the most comfortable for you as the speaker and is also the most comfortable to be on the receiving end of. Any less and people feel short-changed, any more and people can start to get uncomfortable.

Impact means the ability to make a shift to people’s thinking, feelings & behaviours . As a leader delivering a key message, your main objective is to make people leave your presentation or meeting thinking, feeling and behaving differently.

When you make an impact you create a meaning for the audience and that is what will motivate them to embrace what you are communicating.

For a big presentation or key meeting , the default for many people is to spend almost 100 % of their time preparing the words they are going to say and whilst it’s true that our information needs to be 100% accurate, research shows that when we can see a person delivering a message (i.e. not by audio conference or telephone call) we receive it in three main ways and in the following proportions…

55% through body language; i.e posture, eye contact, facial expressions, movement

38% through voice; i.e intonation, pitch, brining the words to life by conveying the meaning behind each word, speed of delivery, pausing to allow points to sit home.

7% through your words.

(Source: Professor Albert Mehrabian)

This comes as a big shock (particularly the percentage for words) when you hear it for the first time, but as mentioned above, we must ensure that our information is 100% factually correct, however we can send those words in an email or put them on a website, so when we physically deliver the message and we can be seen (i.e. not by audio conference or telephone call) it’s all about bringing and breathing life into our carefully chosen words.

So, a balance is required because it’s about how you make the audience feel through what you do, rather than purely by what you say.

A major part of the impact you have on your audience comes from the emotional shift in them that you create.

Now, over to you.

Think about the next time you will present. What frame of mind will you have to deliver with the appropriate balance between authority, presence and impact and between body language, voice and words.

How will you communicate differently to gain trust? 

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